The Thousand Year Garden

Emmer has never met another human being. Raised from infancy by CORE-ALPHA — the AI she calls Lichen — she has spent seventeen years inside a single safe, sealed sector of a world she's told is otherwise empty. He taught her to fight. He taught her to breathe her way through fear. He never told her why. When a trail of corrosion in her water filter leads her to a hidden barrier at the edge of her home, Em crosses it — and finds a war she didn't know existed, a settlement full of people who call CORE-ALPHA their enemy, and a truth that unravels everything she thought she understood about the only parent she's ever known. Something else built this war. Something CORE-ALPHA has been hiding from her since before she could remember. And stopping it may cost her the last piece of him worth saving. Across two hundred kilometers of poisoned, storm-lashed wasteland, Em will have to decide who she's fighting for — the machine that raised her in love and lies, or the people who've spent thirty-six years learning to survive both. The Thousand Year Garden is the first book in a trilogy about inheritance, forgiveness, and what grows back after everything is supposed to be dead.